After all, by the time we toast New Year's Eve, our sweet spot hasn't just been hit--it has been pummeled. Incapable of saying no to office-party cookies and family dessert buffets, we officially join the sugar-sick fairies each year. Now, who can stomach the season's most special sweet--chocolate--in such a state?

That's why we've executed our own pre-emptive sugar strike this year. Not to shun chocolate--no, not that--but instead to rush in and seize all its dark and milky glory. We targeted, gobbled and even toasted the wares of a few local chocolate makers, before it got too late. Before the sugar-shock season set in.

Way back in 1999, our inspiration, Flores, started painting jewel designs on the tops of quarter-sized chocolates, which led to the creation of Sahagun Chocolates (pronounced saw-goon). After she moved from New York to Portland in 2001, Flores set up shop at the Portland Farmers Market and quickly earned a following for her heady, 60 to 70 percent cocoa truffles, mendicants and palets (short cylinders filled with ganache).

"When you have higher cocoa content, you get a real strong, earthy blast of chocolate flavor," says Flores, who took a "Chocolate Technology Course" last year at Richardson Researches in Hayward, California. "You eat one chocolate and it's enough."